David Blunkett plans legal action on television film in UK

Televisionpoint.com Team
UK Cabinet minister David Blunkett has threatened legal action against a new television film on his alleged affair with American-born publisher Kimberly Quinn. A Very Social Secretary, which portrays the work and pensions secretary during his love-struck days, is likely to face MR Blunkett's wrath "if it affects the well-being of his two-year old son" with MS Quinn.

The controller of More 4, the new digital channel that will screen the film next week, MR Peter Dale said the film exposed a UK government that had "curtailed our liberties more than any administration since Cromwell tried to ban Christmas."

The film, written by the satirist Alistair Beaton, depicts MR Blunkett and MR Blair using the September 11 attacks to erode civil liberties. MR Blair and his wife, Cherie, are shown relaxing in Prince Girolamo Strozzi's villa in Tuscany and asking where their next freebie holiday is coming from.

But the most withering portrayals are those of the doomed lovers. MS Quinn, the publisher of The Spectator, is presented as a glamorous but stone-hearted vixen who uses MR Blunkett as a sperm donor and then dumps him.

She and Boris Johnson, the magazine's editor, conspire to trap the "simple Northern lad" in a high society web which he is incapable of negotiating. MR Johnson, the Tory MP for Henley, and a pregnant MS Quinn even swap odds on who the father of her child might be.

MR Beaton said: "The satire is a metaphor for the corruption and cynicism of new Labour and a government which is in love with wealth, privilege and free holidays."

Stephen Pollard, the biographer whose revelations embarrassed MR Blunkett when he was the home secretary, told The Times that the drama was an accurate portrayal of the minister.' "MR Blunkett's female friendships have made him a figure of fun, but I found a real poignancy and sympathy with the portrayal of his struggle as a blind man and the predicament he found himself," he said.